Writing Lab: Your First 5 Pages
Remember that you're treating the nature and consequences of representation in your object.
OK, this is the last chance for feedback from your partner, and you won't get any more formal feedback from Professor DiPiero or from Mr. Leung.* You're going to want to make sure that your first five pages are as polished as possible so that your partner can give you as informed a critique as possible.
By this point your thesis will be sharp and clear, specific and arguable. You should be sick and tired right now of telling other people and yourself what this thesis is. It should be second nature to you. You should know it as well as you know your name, and you should know all the things you need to do to prove it. You should know, that is, all the steps in your argument you need to make to prove it; all the secondary sources about your object that you need; you should have close to hand all the secondary sources about the form and situation of your object; and you should have a number of citations from authors who deal with your methodology so you can make the theoretical points you need to make about your object without having to continually cite PW and RR, which are rather limited.
Click here to download the editing guide you will be using in class on Tuesday. It may help you sharpen up your wriring.
One of the traps to avoid, and this is evident in a number of your three-page writing labs, is that of writing to the plot. That is, you're not treating the object in the manner that the author presented it. You are not, in other words, producing a slightly sophisticated plot summary that uses external sources and theory to re-state what the author said. So, if you're dealing with a narrative about oppressed people, for example, your job is not to show that they're oppressed—presumably the narrative takes care of that—but to show how the text works and what sorts of discontinuities, discursive formations, and/or structures and identities the work contains or produces. Remember, it's not your job simply to confirm or supplement what the author wrote.
And above all remember: focus on the nature and consequences of representation in your object.
*You are, of course, free to meet with your partner whenever and wherever you want, and you can always go to remaining office hours.